Restroom

The standard public-toilet pictogram: a man and a woman side by side. The man is a plain stick figure, the woman the same figure with a skirt, usually with a line between them, on a square that is blue on most platforms as of 2026. On a real wall or map the sign means toilets are available for everyone here, with 🚹 and 🚺 marking the individual doors.

Those two figures are among the most recognised symbols in the world. They come from the wave of wordless signs designed for international travellers in the 1960s and 1970s, popularised by the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the American AIGA transport set of 1974, and later standardised in ISO public-information symbols. That is why the same picture works whether the room is called a restroom or bathroom (US), toilet or loo (UK), washroom (Canada) or WC (much of Europe and Asia).

In emoji it belongs to a run of station and airport signs, such as 🏧, 🛂 and 🛄, inherited from Japanese mobile phones. So it depicts a sign, not a toilet: the fixture itself is 🚽.

What does it mean when someone sends 🚻?

Bathroom: either a place, a direction or a quick break. With a place name or an arrow it is wayfinding: "🚻 left of the entrance", "second floor 🚻". Dropped alone into a group chat it means "back in a minute, bathroom", the same as writing brb. Travel and event posts use it for practical notes about toilets, queues or the lack of them.

It is a sign on a door, so nothing about it is crude: it is the polite, wordless way to raise the subject. Because it shows two figures, someone occasionally uses it to mean "men and women" or a couple, but almost everyone reads it as toilets, so give that reading a second look only if the context has nothing to do with bathrooms. And if you mean a gender-neutral or single toilet, say so in words: the paired figures are the general sign, not a statement about who may enter.